Irony and After: New Bearings in NZ Poetry (2007)

For a long time now I’ve been wondering what the next big upheaval in New Zealand poetry was going to be.

The
hero-saga of New Zealand poetry (in Allen Curnow’s version, at any
rate) tells us that our first few derivative colonial bards (Thomas
Bracken, Alfred Dobell, Edward Tregear) were succeeded by a group of
pastoral Georgians, many of them women (Eileen Duggan, Jessie Mackay and
– to a somewhat lesser degree – Ursula Bethell and Robin Hyde) who were
in their turn displaced by hardheaded Modernists such as Curnow, A. R.
D. Fairburn, Denis Glover and (of course) R. A. K. Mason.

This
triumph of the sons over their predecessors fitted in very nicely with
the theory of literary revolutions promulgated by the young Harold Bloom
in his seminal critical text The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973).
In the Oedipal drama described by Bloom, each poet’s relation to his
predecessors became a source of acute anxiety. In short, poetry is one
more manifestation of the Freudian family romance: sons plot to kill
their father, the elder of the tribe, in order to monopolize the
attentions of their mother, the Muse:

Every poem
[says Bloom] is a misinterpretation of a parent poem. A poem is not an
overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety. Poets' misinterpretations of
poems are more drastic than critics' misinterpretations or criticism,
but this is only a difference in degree and not at all in kind. There
are no interpretations but only misinterpretations …

“A poem
is not an overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety.” Note that last
point as we begin to descend to cases. Let’s take, for example, the Bill
Manhire poem “On Originality” (from his 1977 collection How to Take Your Clothes Off at the Picnic):

Poets, I want to follow them all,out of the forest into the cityor out of the city into the forest.

The first one I throttle.I remove his daggerand tape it to my ankle in a shop doorway.Then I step into the streetpicking my nails.

Everything
in these few lines is significant, is coded to make sense to other
sufferers from this singular anxiety called influence (or “influenza,”
as Bloom himself calls it: “an astral disease”). Our speaker wants to
“follow” all poets, whether their genre be Virgilian pastoral (“out of
the city into the forest”) or Juvenalian satire (“out of the forest into
the city”). After killing the first of them, he steps “into the street /
picking my nails” – a clear reference to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
where the ideal modern artist is described as “within or behind or
beyond or above his handiwork, invisible … indifferent, paring his
fingernails.”

A clear reference, that is, to those in the know
– to other readers of the great Modernists, with Joyce as their
ultimate avatar. There’s an ironic wink here over the heads of a less
learned audience, distracted by the serial-killer details of Manhire’s
sinister protagonist’s pilgrim’s progress.

I trail the next one into the country.On the bank of a river I drilla clean hole in his forehead.

Moved by poetryI put his wallet in a plain envelopeand mail it to the widow.

“Moved
by poetry …” To Manhire, like Bloom, the poet is a killer. His art can
only flourish in the dead body of his predecessors (in this case,
presumably, Curnow and the other New Zealand expressive regionalists:
Baxter, Louis Johnson, Kendrick Smithyman). I don’t know if he had
particular originals in mind for the three poets he throttles, knifes
and shoots in the course of the poem, but it wouldn’t much matter even
if he did. The greatness of Manhire’s poem resides in the simplicity and
pain behind lines such as:

It is a difficult world.Each word is another bruise.

Of
course the poem is a gag. Bill Manhire isn’t really a killer. His
“originality,” here, consists of mixing the high art form of lyric
poetry with the pop culture tropes of the hardboiled thriller. To us,
now, that might seem a postmodern cliché, but one can see the
overwhelming effect it must have had on the hothouse rhetorical
earnestness of his elders when Manhire’s work first began to appear in
the seventies. This was a new voice and a new attitude. Bill Manhire was
cool in a way that no previous New Zealand poet had ever been. It was
as if John Coltrane had suddenly stood up and started to play hot licks
at a hootenanny barn dance.

And so it began, the birth of the
cool. The Oedipal drama had moved into another act, the new Miles Davis /
Manhire had arisen to dispatch old Satchmo / Curnow.

2 – The Birth of Soul

I like typewriters because they are always turned on.– Will Joy Christie

And
yet, how tedious it has started to sound, this revolution of the ironic
and knowing over the ponderous and crafted. Curnow came back with a
vengeance, like a roaring lion, with his own version of the postmodern
aesthetic (most notably in An Incorrigible Music (1979), but
actually in the whole mass of his later work). After all, if cool,
postmodern irony was the new ideal, how easy it was to produce!

It’s
salutary, in this respect, to compare the crystalline reserve of early
Manhire, a mask covering unspeakable depths, with the more facile
playacting of James Brown’s “Loneliness” (from Favourite Monsters, 2002):

I was just sitting there, wandering lonely as a cloud, when– honest to heaven – looking out of the windowI saw Elvis. I know I know, but honest to heavenit was him – or my name’s not James Brown.

The
Wordsworth reference segues easily into the Elvis / James Brown joke,
and, yes, there’s still anguish there, but one can’t help feeling that
it’s ever-so-slightly put on for the occasion. Whatever shock-value and
impetus this poetic movement once possessed, it appears to have left the
building. Which leaves us all sitting by the microphone waiting for the
next big thing, the new Moloch before whom we can all prostrate
ourselves. Is it Glenn Colquhoun? Bill Direen? Who will it be?

Meanwhile
Harold Bloom himself had become unhappy with his old critical
pontifications, and had written a preface to the 1997 reprint of his
most famous book in which he lamented its failure to account for the
protean genius of poetic shapeshifters such as Dante and Shakespeare …

And,
really, it does seem very dated, this Freudian primal myth of
emasculation and cannibalism performed by each new greedy generation on
the last. It seems very male, among other things. Where are the
daughters of the tribe in this scenario? When Michele Leggott revived
the submerged voices of Bethell and Hyde in her 1994 text DIA, where was the anxiety? Was she trying to eat them, replace them? Was she Electra to Manhire and Wedde’s Oedipus?

Many questions, few answers.

•

What I’d like to do now is to recount my own poetic displacement myth,
designed not so much to supplant the Colonialist / Modernist /
Postmodernist map we’ve hitherto accepted as the true face of New
Zealand poetic history, as to supplement and perhaps complicate it a
little.

The recent Hollywood film Ray popularized the
idea of the musical revolution accomplished by blind bluesman Ray
Charles when he set out to combine the emotional intensity of Gospel
with the sexual raunch of Honky-tonk. The Devil’s music had met up with
the Lord’s, and the result was Soul – a new, overarching genre
designation which continued to dominate successive generations of Funk,
New Jack Swing and Hip-hop artists. Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Aretha
Franklin, Mary J. Blige and (yes) James Brown were all, according to
this paradigm, soul artists, nourished by this strange fusion between
the church and the dancehall. Pop and Jazz continued to flourish on
either side of Soul, albeit with innumerable cross-overs and
connections, but there was nevertheless a distinction which had to be
felt rather than described. There was a reason why Whitney Houston was
pop whereas her mother’s old friend Aretha Franklin had soul.

Is
it impossibly pompous of me to claim that for some time now I’ve been
observing the growth of a similar trend in the most distant provinces of
New Zealand poetry, far from the corridors of cultural power?

So
what are the characteristics of this new poetry? Who are its high
priests and priestesses? To whom do they owe allegiance? These are
complex questions, to which I have (as yet) only provisional answers.
All I can say is that of late I’ve observed a strange metamorphosis
taking place among the “despised students of the Humanities” (to quote
from Troy Kennedy Martin’s classic 80s thriller, Edge of Darkness).

On
the one hand we have a generation of graduate students trained in the
austere uncertainties of deconstruction – bookworms to whom Barthes,
Derrida, Foucault, Žižek and Baudrillard are household names. This, I
suppose, might be described as their gospel, their source of
intellectual rigour and intensity.

On the other hand we have the emotional realities of being “doomed – bourgeois – in love” as Whit Stillman’s preppie comedy Metropolitan (1990)
put it. Some of the writers I have in mind are a country mile from
being bourgeois, but you get the general idea: no money, no prospect of
making any, a crippling student debt, and far too much education for
their own comfort.

Out of these two elements has come the most
extraordinarily passionate and disturbing poetry of our time. Some of
the these writers who’ve already published books – and whose work can
therefore be conveniently accessed – include Olivia Macassey (Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Titus, 2006), Will Christie (Luce Cannon, Titus, 2007), Jen Crawford (Admissions, Five Islands Press, 2000), Thérèse Lloyd (many things happened, Pania, 2006) and Tracey Slaughter (Her Body Rises, Random House, 2005).
Among the men, I might mention Scott Hamilton (To the Moon, in Seven Easy Stages, Titus, 2007), and possibly that revered elder statesman Richard Taylor (Conversation with a Stone, Titus, 2007).

You
mustn’t take my word for it (I wouldn’t want you to, in any case). Who,
after all, is their Manhire, their Curnow? Do they gather under
anyone’s umbrella? I think the whole point is that they don’t. There is
no school. They’ve all come independently to the same conclusions: “My
rigorous poststructuralist schooling tells me to distrust emotion and
enthrone the intellect, to detect aporia [gaps] in all simple statements
of feeling., and yet – I hurt. I hurt so much, I’ve been hurt so much
that I have to cry about it. I crave the simplicity of childhood yet
know that I can never go back to it. That was horrible, too, a lot of
the time.”

… three tearsfor the people we used to fuckfor backbones scraped on the washing machinefor the strangers who slept outside your bedroom doorand the schoolgirls and drag queens playing table tennisand the cockroaches breeding in the microwave;and the four am trains and six am busses,mint icecreams, roofs of carparks, moulting hedgehogslit by the phonebox, the grass overrun by wirewovesand rotting cardboard, my summer clothes, my love

But
isn’t this just the same old Romantic cult of childhood all over again,
you ask? Is this the revolution? “Token wonder girls and one trick
ponies, and … wooden clothespegs made into hard unhappy dolls.”
(Macassey, “Outer Suburb”) Not so. Let’s take another example, Scott
Hamilton’s “1918,” a prose poem about the great influenza pandemic:

When
Queenie got the cramps we took her to the small house behind the marae,
and laid her out on a clean sheet, and fetched a bucket of creekwater,
and cooled her stomach and hips, and washed the mushrooms under her
arms. The younger kids giggled beside the bed, expecting another baby
cousin. First her fingernails then her hands turned black; her breasts
swelled, popped their nipples, and dribbled blue-black milk. We couldn’t
straighten her arms in the coffin, so we folded them across her chest.
She looked like she was diving into herself.

Scott’s a
Marxist and (some would say) an ideologue. But in this case it has the
effect of making him value individual experience of world-historical
events above the facile paradoxes of postmodernism. His work reverses
the cliché about R. A. K. Mason, that his conversion to the Left made it
impossible for him to write more poetry. For Scott, it’s precisely
Marxism that enables his poetry – a complex realm of abandoned loners
and doomed explorers heading for the frontier. It’s as if he’s decided
to show us once and for all that Auden’s Orators (1932) holds the seeds of a new poetic, rather than being the “fair notion fatally injured” its own author called it.

3 – The Law of Attraction

Maybe
I have spent too much time these last 40 years thinking about Celan
& translating his work, & maybe Celan's work has been too
essential for my own writing for me to have a detached view on this, but
the association of PC with Britney Spears makes me shudder...– Pierre Joris

When I posted my poem-sequence “The Britney Suite” (first published in 2001) on The Imaginary Museum,
my online blog, a couple of months ago, it was actually in response to a
number of people who’d demanded to see it, presumably intrigued by the
conceit of engineering a meeting between anguished
concentration-camp-survivor poet Paul Celan and blonde pop goddess
Britney Spears.

I was a little disconcerted to see that the point
of this jarring juxtaposition escaped Pierre Joris. But I was far more
surprised to see how many people rose to my defense. They could see what
I was talking about. They understood the idea of trying to bridge the
gaping abysses cutting across our culture.

Recently I watched a documentary called The Secret,
which purported to offer the answer to all of life’s problems in the
(so-called) “law of attraction.” The universe, claimed the various
snake-oil salesmen and hokum-peddlers in this
made-for-TV-but-gone-straight-to-DVD movie, will supply you with
anything you call to yourself. If you expect a flat tyre and a bill in
the letterbox, that’s what the universe will send you. In effect,
anything you receive you’ve asked for in advance.
Of course this
is a simplistic way to go about explaining the inconceivably complex
gestalt of life, the universe, and everything, but it’s so dumb it’s
almost wise. If only it could be so! “Thinking positive” and “having a
good attitude” may be irritating clichés, but the placebo effect
indubitably works sometimes. Your mental attitude does affect your
physical health.

If this double-mindedness, this fusion of
extreme intelligence and New Age moron-fodder repels you, you’ll
probably be happier with a more comfortable range of poetry. If,
however, your attraction to it is stronger than the repulsion, then
you’re probably already of the Devil’s party without knowing it. In
short, you have soul.

I’d like to finish by quoting from “The Uncanny Truth about Abelard,” (published in brief 25 (2002): 39-41), Olivia Macassey’s charting of the permeable membranes connecting her two worlds.

12:37 am on Oct. 4

“We
deplore the disappearance of the real under the weight of too many
images. But let’s not forget that the image disappears too because of
reality”

– Jean Baudrillard c2000 (do you believe it? My lonely twin.)

9:16 pm on Nov. 16

for example I have no thought now of what you look like, exceptthat saints have your eyes. When they are dying.

Excisions. Elliptical scar around the nothing, and those dark thighs.she could push her fingers in there, it is an eyeunder the window, thinks a woman who thinks

1:23 am on Dec. 8Yesterday I saw you (me) for the first time (for the hundredth time). Youtold
me that you have been reading those same letters etc; these
coincidences no longer bother me. I can see where I have been thinking:
my ghost on every page.

Already the quote marks are fading; they will be my things,it will become my dream; you will afterwards believe – because you will only be meYou will no longer read me, it is beginning,embraces me in the water, limping and howling,follows me everywhere, saves for (me) the last card. I cover everything. I arrive.

Abelard had gotten it wrong – I was Abelard; I am him all along

all of the words will be mine.

Heloise,
“a woman who thinks,” and Abelard, “my lonely twin” have been so chewed
up, dispersed, mythologized and distanced by our histories that they’ve
come to seem, finally, unapproachable. Macassey can see that, but she
refuses to admit defeat. Her own levels of experience speak more
strongly the more mediated they are by puppets and lonely quotes.

“Let’s
not forget that the image disappears too because of reality …” Our
nostalgia can be as much for the lost certainties of the intellect as
for the simplicity of the unclouded heart.

Macassey’s poem, like
so many others by the poets I’ve mentioned above, laments our incapacity
to learn how to live in this strange dystopia we’ve built in the midst
of plenty.

Can’t we all learn to get on? To understand each
other? To stop being so goddamned horrible so much of the time? That is
what the new poetry I’ve been seeing sprouting up, irrepressible, all
around me, is about.

I’m afraid you didn’t realise what you were
doing when you funded all those PhDs, imported those books of French
theory, when you allowed those souls to grow up, angst-ridden and
dispossessed, in the dark corners of your kingdom.

This is my nest of weapons.This is my lyrical foliage.

So
Bill Manhire, thirty years ago. I see no need to replay all those
Bloomian fantasies of overthrowing the elders of the tribe, conducting a
palace coup in the centre of culture. Can’t we embrace our elders
instead of excommunicating them?

All the new poets want to do is
to teach you how to feel again. However difficult that may be. If you
don’t get it first time (thinking, perhaps, that you’re too smart),
they’ll persevere. They’re patient. They’ve got soul.

Bibliography:

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 1973. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

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About Me

I've published several collections of poems, including City of Strange Brunettes (1998), Chantal's Book (2002), To Terezin (2007), Celanie (2012) and A Clearer View of the Hinterland (2014), as well as three novels, a novella and two books of short fiction. I've also edited a number of books and literary magazines, including (from 2014) Poetry NZ. I have a PhD in English from Edinburgh University, and work as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University's Albany campus (ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3988-3926).